The unnatural loss of one's teeth is one of the biggest health issues in the world today. Aside from normal teeth loss that commonly occurs from childhood to early adulthood, loss of one's teeth due to old age and/or poor oral hygiene care affects millions of people worldwide. Furthermore, as people continue to live longer and longer, this condition will continue resulting in more and more individuals relying on dentures to replace some or all of their teeth.
Dentures, however, can be embarrassing for some people to wear. Individuals may believe, for example, that dentures look and feel unnatural. Many elderly people, however, rely on dentures to assist them in a large number of their daily activities. For instance, not only can dentures provide one with the ability to chew and enjoy a good meal, they can also help people speak properly, as well as put on a confident smile. Thus, dentures are critical for helping people suffering from unnatural teeth loss to stay nourished as well as improve their mental state.
Although dentures provide many advantages to a patient, the patient may be required to visit their dental practitioner (e.g., a prosthodontist) multiple times to obtain a properly fitting set of dentures. Additionally, the dental practitioner may also have to rely upon an equal number of laboratory procedures to obtain a suitable set of dentures for a patient, such that the dentures have the right look, feel, and fit. For example, a practitioner may have to individually set teeth in wax forms based on data provided by a dentist. This process, however, may be time consuming and labor intensive for the practitioner. Furthermore, at each dental visit, the practitioner may test the fit and feel of the denture device. If there are modifications needed to be made to the denture device, the practitioner may have to send an interim denture back to a denture manufacturer to perform any adjustments needed to be made, which further exacerbates the cost and time associated with obtaining properly fitting dentures as these adjustments require the manual labor of highly skilled technicians.
In light of the aforementioned, denture fabrication may appear part art and part science. For instance, a particular adjustment to a denture, performed by a given technician on a given day, may be different than the same adjustment made by the same technician on a different day. Any slight error in the placement of one or more teeth in a denture (e.g., a lower or mandibular denture) may render it incompatible with a counterpart denture (e.g., an upper or maxillary denture). This error-prone and inefficient process of fine tuning a denture increases dental costs, and can frustrate both the practitioner and the patient. Conventional denture fabrication thus involves a series of time consuming and expensive laboratory procedures and so there is a need for improved dental devices and systems and methods for the same.
Thus, it would be beneficial for there to be improved dental devices, and systems and methods for making the same, that enable a dental device to be created efficiently such that a patient may obtain a properly fitting denture without excess cost and time expenditure.